Wide Beta Spotlight Postponed

Chris KiritzTuesday, May 07, 2013

A couple weeks ago I announced our plans for a Wide Beta Spotlight in which we would disable the current version of Magic Online and require players to use the Wide Beta. Encouraged by the Wide Beta so far, we wanted more players to check out where we were in the development and to get as many new eyes on the client as possible. As an incentive, we would even offer Dragon's Maze Prerelease Events a day early! While the Prerelease Events will be starting early as scheduled, we are postponing the Wide Beta Spotlight.

When I made that announcement, we were getting ready to release a new build that included significant updates to the Duel Scene, Trade, and Chat and also targeted some of our bigger performance and stability issues. Unfortunately, once we deployed the updates to our production environment, we found that we introduced some new issues that have severely impacted the player experience.

We have spent the last two weeks hunting down and fixing as many of these problems as we could. Ultimately, however, we were unable to address all of the outstanding issues we wanted or needed to. As a result, we are going to wait on the Wide Beta Spotlight until we can ensure that a player's first experience with the new Magic Online is a quality one.

While this was not an easy decision, it is the right one. We know that the majority of Magic Online players have not tried the Wide Beta. When they do decide to try it, whether it is on their own or during a future Spotlight, we want that experience to be as good as we can possibly make it, and right now we are not quite there. When we are, we will be sure to let you know.

In the meantime, however, every cloud has a silver lining and the Dragon's Maze Prerelease Events will start at 10:00 AM PDT, Thursday May 9, as scheduled and run through the weekend. Hmm…does that actually make it a gold lining? In any case, choose your guild and enjoy an extra day of Dragon's Maze Prerelease Events.